Abstract

Although solar water heating for Southern California apartments was chosen because of its significance to energy conservation. It is attractive for many other reasons. The most significant of these is that of all the applications for solar energy, multiple-unit water heating appears to have the best chance of becoming economically competitive. (See Ref. 2)
In this study. three objectives were accomplished:
1. Definition of a baseline system, specifying plumbing configuration, materials, components, and collector design
concept.
2. Estimation of system cost and performance.
3. Identification of alternate approaches to the system and component design. enabling solar water heating to become commercially viable.
After briefly examining a wide variety of system configurations for a gas-supplemented solar water heater, we chose one system for a preliminary design study. This "baseline system" could be built completely with existing technology. Technical performance of the baseline system was evaluated by a computer simulation model, using hourly weather data for the year 1961 obtained from the weather station in Burbank, California. Solar radiation at Burbank is typical of a large region of the Los Angeles Basin. Average hourly hot water demand for apartments from Reference 1 was used for the simulation of demand.